Fantasyland, “Mattering Matters” Win Forkosch Awards for 2017

The Council for Secular Humanism has announced the recipients of the 2017 Forkosch Awards, recognizing the book and Free Inquiry article that made the greatest contributions toward the advancement of secular humanism during that year.

The Morris D. Forkosch Award for Best Book of 2017 goes to novelist and public radio host Kurt Andersen for his nonfiction bestseller Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History, which explores Americans’ heightened predisposition toward fallacies, falsehoods, and extraordinary claims.

The Selma V. Forkosch Award for Best Article for 2017 goes to Rebecca Newberger Goldstein for her February/March 2017 essay in Free Inquiry, “Mattering Matters.” The article fully explores her concept of mattering, which she introduced in her 1983 debut novel, later to discover that the idea had been taken up by philosophers. As she contends in her article, the drive to feel that one matters “lies close to an aspect of human nature that all but defines what it is to be human.”